Great trip with my two former players (football) and Skye

Traveled down to the Honda Center in Irving. UCLA handed BYU its first loss of the year. I am sure there will be more,but not many. These two young men, Miguel and Alex, have been not only good football players , but excellent people and fun to be around. If I could just get them to tolerate Porterville High School football. Just Kidding-It is a rivalry and boy do I understand rivalries. This college basketball game was the feature game of the Johnny Woooden Classic. First one held after his death this summer.He was 99 years old if I remember right. Along with coach Al Videratta from Napa High, and LaVell Edwards, BYU's legendary coach and my coach, UCLA's Johhny Wooden was someone who inspired me when I was a little kid, as well as, a father, teacher and coach. He is well known for his wisdom and this quote is apropos for all of my family:

 The most important profession in the world is parenting. The second is teaching, and everyone is a teacher to someone.

COACH JOHNNY WOODEN

No Class

In the thirty some odd years that I have coached various sports, I can truly say that I have only been accused of running up the score one time. That was against Delano and I wasn't quite sure I meant to do it. Just this weekend I supervised a J.V. and 9th grade basketball tourney and witnessed some lop-sided games that made my heart beat slow with empathy for our girls. Well, if you have met my wife you would know that her heart would beat fast with anger for the team who presses in the fourth quarter with a 46 point lead. "No class" was her echoing charge as she made perfectly clear. Yes she over did it and I told her so. But give me a break, a forty-six point lead and still pressing? "Victory with Honor" is the battle cry in our district; for some it is lost after the word "victory." With year round club teams and the physicality of basketball it can be down right disgusting to see how the purity of the game has changed to rough house and a total commitment to one sport so a coach and player must squeeze the life out of each game,no matter how good the opponent is, to to feel that it is all worth it. I long for the days of three sport athletes who relish in the spirit of competition. My wife can see the sadness and meanness and just can't let it go. Such has been my life with my wife.

William Cullen Bryant

OK Class,
Today we are discussing "Thantopsis" a poem by Bryant, not Kobe! It means a view of death. He teaches us that life is in fact a journey and it will end in death for us all. We get to return top the earth and sleep in little narrow boxes and in the same earth that great men and women has already been buried. I am having my class memorize the last Stanza because I like it. It reads:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take	75
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch	80
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

I like it as he challenges us all to enjoy our lives,live courageously and then settle down to a non-regretting "couch" that lies adorned in the great splendor of the world.  Now you might think I am going bonkers and worried about death. Quite the contrary I am excited about his poetry which romanticizes the not not so subtle terror of death. You should read "The Waterfowl" as well as it is an allegory of life and how we are steered by an unknown Power from birth to yeah yeah yeah I know   Death. I have been teaching his poetry for a while and became fascinated by it last week as I bored my junior English class to-----------------------yes you guessed it----death.